Direwolf 1.10, And Why We’re Not Updating

When it rains, it pours! This week has been full of Minecraft updates, and FTB also sees some love. Direwolf has released an update for his modpack, built on Minecraft 1.10. While the modpack brings updated versions of many of our favorite mods, some have been removed from the pack, namely Twilight Forest, Bibliocraft, Ender Zoo, among others. But that’s not the reason why we aren’t updating, the main reason is rather…complex.

To put it simply, when Drew and I built the server network, we built it on top of the very popular, very well-supported CraftBukkit API. This API is used by nearly every Minecraft server in existence, and is what runs all of our plugins. And while it’s still in active development for vanilla Minecraft, support for modded Minecraft (our FTB server) has been dropped since 1.7.10. Sponge, a new API, does support 1.10 modded Minecraft, but it lacks virtually every plugin we use, and some mods don’t even work with it (we’re glaring at you, AppliedEnergistics2).

But going back to what I said earlier: Drew and I built this server on the CraftBukkit API. The ability to chat with players in the Survival server while you’re in the FTB server, or have the same rank everywhere requires homogeneity. All servers need to be using the CraftBukkit API for things to “just work”. And by changing the FTB server to use Sponge (when all the bugs are fixed) means a lot of that “just work” functionality will be broken. And so, with all these reasons, (and many more that Drew and I have labored over but aren’t worth going into detail), the FTB server will remain on Direwolf 1.7.10 for the foreseeable future. We’ll continually re-evaluate the situation, hoping for the best and trying new things out. But in the meantime, there’s no need to worry about losing your creations.

As always, we’ll continue to add new features and more ways to enjoy Minecraft. We’re working very hard on getting 1.11 live on the Main and Survival servers, and we’ll be introducing new cosmetic features for players soon, including trails and custom heads. We welcome player feedback, and we look forward to the holiday season as we begin to decorate the map with seasonal joy 🙂